


Bashful Child, Beginning To Grow

by Pinkist



Series: Honey, Honey (How You Thrill Me) [6]
Category: LOONA (Korea Band)
Genre: Age Regression/De-Aging, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-07
Updated: 2019-09-07
Packaged: 2020-10-11 13:44:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20547131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pinkist/pseuds/Pinkist
Summary: Sometimes internet rituals promise to make you rich, but turn you into a toddler instead. Lip wishes Jinsoul didn’t have to learn this the hard way.





	Bashful Child, Beginning To Grow

**Author's Note:**

> Wrote this one on my phone while walking to the bus stop so if the quality questionable you know why lol
> 
> ABBA Song: The Name Of The Game (Unedited)

"Lip you have to come home right now!"

Yerim's voice is slightly obscured by the static crackling of the phone — bad service interfering at the worst times.

She sounds hysteric enough for Lip to look up from the fruit section, thoughts of strawberry prices fleeing her mind momentarily. "What? What? What happened?"

"Jinsoul is a baby!" The statement is wailed into the phone at a volume that makes Lip pull the device away from her ear to save herself potential hearing loss.

She rolls her eyes, attention back to the fruit. "I don't have time for this, Yerim."

Four dollars for a kilo... That was cheaper than the last store, but she could probably find better.

Yerim has no such concerns and promptly screeches into her ear once more. "_Lip_!"

"Okay fine. Haha. I laughed, now let me go back to grocery shopping."

"Lip she's actually turned into a baby and I don't know how long I can keep her alive for because she keeps climbing—"

There's a crash, closely followed by Yerim's gasp and the distinct sound of a toddler laughing.

Lip drops the strawberries instantlly, bolting out of the store before her mind has time to wrap around what Yerim's told her.

It's possible that she's being pranked, Lip knows this, but she also knows that Yerim's brand of pranking aimed more for bewildering the victim rather than stressing them out.

Then again, it's also possible that Yerim is the one being fooled.

Yerim was the type that liked to believe the conspiracies and fairytales, it didn’t take much effort to fool her.

Still, Lip knows what she heard and prank or not, she wasn't going to leave Yerim alone with a baby, especially if it was Jinsoul.

"Hold it with both hands," Lip instructs sternly. "Don't feed it any chunky solids until I get there. We have bananas on the counter, mash them up if it gets hungry and you better not be shitting me or I'll remove your knee caps when I get home. Got it?"

Yerim's reply is delivered with a shaky breath, and a fair amount of sniffling. "Yeah."

It takes Lip around half an hour to get home, leg bouncing the whole bus ride there.

She must've looked like a mess; knuckles white as they gripped tightly onto the seat handles, hair windswept, no doubt a frantic expression pasted on her face.

She wouldn't lie and say she didn't care. Being composed mattered to her, and being seen as such mattered an equal amount.

But Yerim was alone with a baby, and well... Yerim was pretty much still a baby herself, at least to Lip.

Yerim's age is even more evident to Lip when she finally makes it home.

Her younger friend looks positively wrecked. Her eyes are dull, missing their usual joyful glimmer, red rings and tear tracks lining them. Yerim cried easily, but especially when she was frustrated.

Contrasting her in appearance, is the blubbering baby nestled on her lap.

It's brown hair is sparse is crowns her head in tufts. Lip's note sure why she's surprised with the colour. She's always known that Jinsoul wasn't born blonde, but for some reason she'd expected to see the baby with platinum locks anyway.

"You look like shit...ake."

"I feel like Shitake," Yerim replies, begging Lip with her eyes.

It's easy for Lip to concede when Yerim looks so desperate, and the baby is looking at her with big, brown eyes.

The baby splutters something nonesensical as she's passed to Lip's secure grip, mouth immediately attaching itself to Lip's black, long sleeves, soaking it in saliva.

"Gross," Yerim comments, picking up the barely-touched banana on the table, discarding the spoon she used to feed the baby, taking a well-deserved snack break.

Lip grins in agreement. "You're a disgusting baby, aren't you?" She asks, voice higher in pitch and much more enthusiastic than it usually sounded.

The baby— Jinsoul (now that she could see it's face, she could see the traces of her friend on the baby. Enough to confirm Yerim's tears at least.) seemed to enjoy this, and did her best to clap, squealing in joy when Lip continued. "Yucky little slobber-monster!"

"How come she doesn't scream at you? That's no fair," Yerim whines. "All she did with me was scream and throw banana at my face."

Lip sniggers, pulling baby Jinsoul closer. "I guess I'm just better."

Yerim pouts a tad dramatically, but doesn't bother correcting her.

"How'd this happen anyway?"

"The baby thing?"

"What else could I be talking about Yerim?" Jinsoul had moved on from teething on Lip's sleeve to sucking on a strand of her hair. She did her best not to wince in disgust.

Yerim smiles cheekily. "Well when two people love each other very much—"

"Yerim!"

Yerim laughs, but relents nonetheless. "Okay so we were looking up spooky internet rituals—“

“Why would you do that?” Lip interrupts.

“It’s Saturday, what were we supposed to do?”

Lip has a lot of suggestions, none of which involve rituals of any sort, but she’s not sure her roommates will appreciate them. “My bad.”

“Exactly. Anyway so she was trying one that was supposed to make her rich, but I think something went wrong ‘cause next thing I know there’s a baby and no Soul.

“You _think_ something went wrong?”

Yerim shrugs. “Well I mean ten dollars fell from the ceiling so I think something went right too. Think positive, yeah?”

“Yerim, Soul is a baby.”

“Trust me, I _know_.” Yerim seems to age ten years with that response. Clearly Jinsoul hadn’t been well-behaved for her at all.

The baby in question gurgles out a giggle, finding amusement in Yerim’s exhaustion. “Ba!” She says. “Ba ba ba!”

“I have no idea what you’re saying, Babysoul, but I love the effort.”

Apparently, it’s the right thing to say because Jinsoul looks pleased with the reply, promptly returning to chewing on Lip’s hair.

“‘Ba’ back at you, demon child,” Yerim mutters back, looking all too ready to fight an actual baby.

“Do you know if there’s a way to reverse this?” Lip asks, because she knows if she doesn’t distract Yerim now, she’ll have to watch her friend be destroyed by a toddler and lose the last fragments of her dignity.

“No. I wanted to look it up, but she kept screaming at me. Gimme a sec.”

They’re seated in front of Jinsoul’s laptop, said baby on Lip’s lap as she and Yerim navigate the site that gave Jinsoul the ritual in the first place.

It’s gaudy and cheap looking, and Lip’s respect for her friends lessen just a little, knowing they tried something from a website that looked like this.

Lip sighs to herself when Yerim clicks the link for ‘Commonly Asked Questions,’ and wonders at what point in her life she could stop being surprised by her friends.

“I feel like I’m in a fantasy novel,” she moans. “We’re so out of our depth.”

“Fairytales have happy endings,” Yerim offered in consolation.

“The little mermaid literally dies.”

“Okay well Jinsoul isn’t going to die,” Yerim assures. “Probably.”

The Site loads, and she cheers like an overexcited child.

The fact Yerim genuinely believes she’ll find the answer there makes Lip want to scream. The fact that Yerim is correct makes her want to scream louder.

“It should wear off in ten hours,” Yerim reads aloud, beaming bright with relief. “Oh thank god.”

“You’ll have to buy diapers then. And some baby food. She’s definitely gonna get hungry before that time ends and she’s definitely going to shitake herself too.”

“Why do _I_ have to get it?”

“Do you want to be left alone with the baby?”

“Fair point.”

Lip doesn’t have much to do while Yerim’s gone. Ye baby has mellowed out and looked to be on the brink of passing out, so she made an effort not to move too much.

She hums a tune under her breath and wishes Jinsoul was with her. Adult Jinsoul, who, while prone to testing out strange internet rituals, was resourceful and much more equipped at handling children.

Lip had no doubt that if roles were reversed, Soul would be dealing with the situation with miraculous ease.

In a voice more tender than she knew she was capable, she began to speak; to herself, to Jinsoul, she wasn’t too sure.

“When you grow up, we’re going to be best friends,” she tells the baby. “Me, you, and this brat we pick up along the way.” Lip can almost hear Yerim’s affronted ‘hey!’ And the fake sniffles that would follow.

When she was younger, Lip would read fairytales. She was pedantic by nature, and such silly stories would normally be deemed useless, if not for the lessons she received from them

Her least favourite of these stories, was The Little Mermaid. Unable to understand how someone would be so willing to sacrifice so much, and unaccepting of the tragic ending the story told.

Now that she was older, holding the toddler-version of her adult friend, she found herself in a situation closer to a fairytale than what she was comfortable with calling reality.

Now that she was older, she understood. Love was no flimsy thing, and she was hardly convinced one simply fell in it, but she believed in its power. Love was effort, and compromise, and watching dog videos in Jinsoul’s room in the early hours of the morning as Yerim slept between them.

If she was asked, she was sure she could sacrifice something as little as her voice, for the two girls she adored.

She takes a few selfies of the baby on her phone to remember the moment by, and pats Jinsoul’s head softly. “I’m never gonna let you forget this one, Soul,” Lip laughs to herself.

Yerim returns and Lip has hardly moved. The baby is sound asleep, leaving the two adults to find quiet ways to entertain themselves.

Lip almost feels a little sad to put the baby down on the couch, surrounded by a wall of pillows, preventing it from falling, and pillows scattered all over the floor just in case it does.

The silence doesn’t last long, not that Lip actually expected it too. Yerim has always had far too much energy, and she was buzzing with so much anxious anticipation she could hardly sit still.

“Let’s dress her up.”

“She’s a baby, not a doll, Yerim.”

“No, I know. But what if she turns back and she’s naked? Like, we should probably get her into real-people clothes.”

“Baby’s are real people.”

“Uh-huh, sure.”

Yerim brings up a good point, but Lip has to wonder... “Where’d the baby clothes come from, then?”

Both Lip and Yerim turn slowly to stare at Soul’s light blue onesie.

“Well I didn’t dress her, and I don’t think anyone owns baby clothes in the first place, so I’m gonna guess that the ritual felt sorry for us or something.”

“Well then won’t the ritual dress her again?”

“Better to be safe then sorry.” Lip agrees, helping Yerim pull a baggy, white top from Jinsoul’s closet, grabbing simple black leggings as well.

The apartment has turned fairly dark, last rays of the setting sun illuminating the dim corners of the living room through the window, though it’s not particularly bright.

Neither Lip or Yerim are willing to risk waking Soul by turning the lights on, so they settle for a phone flashlight at the other end of the room to see, and do their best to change Jinsoul’s clothes as gently as possible.

Yerim winces when she accidentally jostles Jinsoul while pulling a short, chubby arm trough the top-large sleeves of adult-Jinsoul’s top, but sighs in relief when the baby produces no reaction.

“Thank god she sleeps so heavy. Guess that’s something she never grew out of, huh?”

Lip smirks, threading Jinsoul’s leg through the leggings. “One day there’s gonna be a house fire and she’s gonna be so fucked— a shit— shitake!” Lip’s hushed whispers turn into an exclamation that elicit a whine from the baby, silencing her instantly. “Shitake,” she says.

The baby wakes, but it’s easy to convince it go back to sleep when both Yerim and Lip are cuddling her from either side, providing a blanket of warmth in the form of lithe limbs.

They settle on the couch for the night, legs tucked in awkwardly, as to not surpass the length of the couch. Lip could already feel the pangs of pain on her neck, back, and knees when she rose from her uncomfortable position the next morning. She had no doubt that Yerim was suffering the same fate as well.

When Lip finally awakes, it’s to the early morning darkness of 2am, and Jinsoul is beside her, spluttering but fully adult.

Lip notes that while she’s in the oversized tee and leggings that she and Yerim dressed her in, she’s also sporting a tank top, and based on their outline, shorts.

“Gross! Lip, your hair’s all in my mouth!”

“You think that’s gross? My hair probably smells like drool, Soul!”

The squabbling, and maybe the flying elbows wake Yerim, who looks happy beyond belief to see Jinsoul back.

“Soul!” Yerim launches herself at Jinsoul, skinny arms encircling around the blonde’s waist tightly. “Never do that again!”

Jinsoul looks positively lost, turning to Lip for help. “What’d I do?”

“What do you remember?”

“Well Yerim and I were trying out some rituals — Ooh! We found one to get rich, wanna try it?”

“No!” Yerim and Lip are synchronised in their insistence, completely horrified with the idea.

“No, no, never,” Yerim says, punctuating each word with a hand movement.

Lip is inclined to agree. “You tried that yesterday,” she explains to their confused friend. “You did something wrong and turned into a baby.”

“No I didn’t?”

“You did and I was traumatised,” Yerim says flatly, as of demanding compensation. “You’re an awful baby.”

Lip pulls her phone out from her pocket, scrolling through her images, until she finds the selfies she took just the day before. “Look.”

Soul gasps, hands snatching the device from Lip’s grip. “Shut up!”

“Yeah,” Lip confirms.

“I was so cute!”

Yerim’s expression turns sour at the thought of babysoul. “No, you really weren’t. You threw food at my face.”

“You probably deserved it,” Soul dismisses, smiling mischievously. “Did we at least get rich?”

“Well according to Yerim we got ten dollars.”

“Totally worth it then.”

The resounding “No!” Is predictable.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
